Friday, July 18, 2014

REVIEW 277: AMIT SAHNI KI LIST

Release date:

July 18, 2014

Director:

Ajay Bhuyan

Cast:

Language:

Vir Das, Vega
Tamotia, Anindita Nayar, Kavi Shastri

Hindi with English

Vir Das can be genuinely funny. His stand-up
comedy routines, I mean the ones I’ve seen, have been cheeky and irreverent
without being distasteful or crude. And I remember nearly falling off my chair
laughing when I interviewed him with his fellow cast members from Badmaash Company, back when I worked at
a channel that he insisted on calling HeadWines Today. But stand-up comedy is
usually a monologue. Few films can pull that off. Amit Sahni Ki List has so much of Amit Sahni talking to us the
audience, that the entire film feels like one big monologue with some poorly
etched out characters on the sidelines. And no, ASKL can’t pull it off.

This is such a huge disappointment because, of the
three Hindi film releases this week, the one with the most promising trailers
was this one. Besides, Das has managed to be quite charming as part of ensemble
casts in comic ventures such as Delhi Belly and Go Goa Gone. And those
two lovely dance-able songs – Ab main kya
karoon (music and singing by Raghu Dixit;) and What the fark (music: Palash Muchhal, singers: Rahul Vaidya, Amit Mishra, Aditi
Singh Sharma) – are just so much fun and so
different in tone, tenor and delivery from what we’re used to in Hindi cinema. Not
surprising considering that the composers are not yet Bollywood regulars.

Unfortunately, these nuts and bolts don’t add up
to much because ASKL takes a concept
bursting with potential, and expands it into the thinnest screenplay to emerge
from Mumbai in a while.

When the crux of a film is pretty much what the
film is in its entirety, you know there’s a problem. Here’s what it is: Amit
Sahniis a well-off young MBA working
with a multinational corporation who lives in a spacious, well-appointed flat,
wears Pink Floyd and Metallica T-shirts, and is searching for the perfect girl based
on a list of criteria he has made to aid his search. After a series of
predictably disastrous dates with a bunch of cardboard cutouts – Kinky Pinky
gets turned on by conversations about cars and tries to bang him while he’s
driving; Sheena is a celebrity trainer who’s not really interested in a
boyfriend/husband as much as she is looking for a cook who will help her stay trim – he meets free-spirited Mala (Vega Tamotia). She
ticks off virtually none of the items on his list, but he finds an emotional
connection that he can’t understand. Just as he’s allowing that relationship to
teach him something about life and lists, he meets Devika (Anindita Nayar), a
voluptuous Ms Perfect According to Amit Sahni Ki List with whom he gets along so well that they never ever fight.

That’s it. Not a single situation in the film
allows the characters to rise above what I can only guess must have been the
one-line description of each of them in the initial concept note.

Firstly, the film is so one-sided that we at no
point get to identify with the girls or for that matter, with Amit’s silent dad
who is always reading newspapers, or his wannabe cool mother who has been
dreaming about his marriage even before hers happened, or his childhood friend who
is a wannabe chef (played by the good-looking Kavi Shastri).

Second, it’s simplistic. There’s not a thing the
film discovers about relationships beyond the point that is so obvious from the
minute you hear the explanation for the title in the first few scenes. ASKL’s idea of depth seems to be to have
Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy lying on
the table when Amit visits Mala at home one day.

Third, its idea of what is cool is odd. Mala
whistles at a waiter in a restaurant and that’s presented to us as evidence of
how hip and unfettered she is. Err…I don’t know about you, but I would be
completely put off by people who whistle at human beings to attract their
attention, but especially at waiters, busboys, servers in banquet halls,
flight attendants, household help and subordinates at work. And if that didn’t
go against her, how come Amit can bear being called Gappi by her? Gappi?
Seriously?! Yikes!

Fourth, Amit himself is dull and not well fleshed
out despite the zillion lines the film gives him.

Fifth, the film is verbose. Oh so verbose. I like Das. I do, I do. But at one point I was so exhausted listening to his unrelenting narration that I wanted to cry out to him
to stop talking.

Add to this the fact that both the actresses – to
borrow a very politically incorrect term from Amit’s mother – struck me as “BTMs
(behenjis turned modern)”, an acronym
that I remember was popular back when I was in college. Sorry, I know that
might be categorised as a classist comment, but it’s not. I’m merely pointing
out that their personalities are not quite suited to the clothes they’re made
to wear and their styling. There are few things as unattractive as people trying
to be what they intrinsically are not.

The final nail in the coffin of my experience of ASKL: for the most part, it is a bore. What
does it say about the film that the funniest line comes about one-and-a-half
hours into the story (it involves Doordarshan, I won’t say more). Das has a
likeable screen presence that is wasted here. You just need to watch him in a
village in Durg in Chattisgarh towards the end of the film, turning the simple
act of scratching his way up a hillside into a moment of brief hilarity, to
know what he’s capable of. But like stand-up comedians, actors too need solid
written material to back them. ASKL’s
screenplay (credited to Shiv Singh and Rohit Banawlikar) does not have that.

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About Me

Anna MM Vetticad is an award-winning journalist, journalism teacher and author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic, an overview of the Hindi film industry presented through an account of a year in which she watched every single Bollywood film released in India’s National Capital Region. A journalist since 1994, she has worked with India Today, The Indian Express and Headlines Today. At HT she hosted her own interview show Star Trek which drew all India’s eminent entertainment personalities. While Anna has spent most of her career as a behind-the-scenes editorial person, she has also reported on most major Indian entertainment and lifestyle events and several international ones including Cannes and the Oscars, in addition to being the film critic for Headlines Today. She is currently reporting and writing for multiple publications on cinema and social issues with a focus on gender concerns. The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic is available on amazon.com, ebay.in, flipkart.com, ombooksinternational.com, ombooks.com, infibeam.com, homeshop18.com and dialabook.in among other websites, and in stores across India. Twitter: @annavetticad